70 years ago this month, Orson Welles (pictured in a scene from "Citizen Kane") began writing for this very paper. But his boring subject matter - a wealth of personal problems - led to a perfect storm for failure.Everett Collection

Orson Welles is remembered as a giant of Hollywood (“Citizen Kane”), radio (“The War of the Worlds”) and theater. But few are aware of his brief, eccentric career as a political columnist for the New York Post, a short-lived venture that began 70 years ago this month.

The Post had been owned since 1939 by banking heiress Dorothy Schiff, who shared Welles’ liberal political beliefs (the actor’s FBI file, disclosed several decades later, labeled him as a Communist by 1945).

Schiff’s third husband, Post editor Ted Thackrey, recruited Welles as a star addition to the then-afternoon newspaper’s large squad of columnists.

“What is it that makes a man want to write for the newspapers?” The actor wrote in The Post before the launch of his column, “Orson Welles’ Almanac.”

“All too often my public appearances had more to [do with] presumption than equipment, so don’t ask me why I can write a column. Compare me, if you will, to my foolish and finny cousin, the salmon, who toils and labors upstream against the most fearful odds, only to lay his little eggs.”

Welles’ first column on Jan. 22, 1945, was an eyewitness account of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s fourth inauguration (“He played his part in the ritual like a veteran bridegroom”) and a history lesson about inaugurations going all the way back to George Washington (“His voice shook so that the men could hardly hear it”).

A teaspoon of chocolate will improve the taste of your coffee.

- One of Orson Welles' 'scoops'

And his third column contained questionable claims that “the fascist salute was invented by the Hollywood film director C.B. DeMille,” and that Welles was offered the role of legendary actor John Barrymore in a (never-made) biopic (“The luckless player who tries it is committing suicide”).

Welles plugged “When Strangers Marry,” a modest B-thriller that he had no ties to and that he called “one of the most gripping and effective pictures of the year. It isn’t as slick as ‘Double Indemnity’ or as glossy as ‘Laura,’ but it’s better acted, better directed than either.”

On Jan. 30, Welles mocked an article in the New Yorker magazine, which “pokes a good bit of hearty fun at me for bothering my head about anything grown-up…The editor of this Almanac [Welles] already has a fat scrapbook full of indignant newsprint demanding his return to the playhouse. He doesn’t lose much sleep over these angry mementos…”

At first, “Orson Welles’ Almanac” ran five days a week. But by spring, Welles’ editors at The Post were losing patience with his column, which was mostly given over to lengthy digressions about domestic and international politics written in grandiloquent style –— with an occasional dubiously sourced “scoop’’ like this one: “Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil, the vegetable oil king of France, while enjoying a favored spot in [Nazi] inner-councils, actually occupied an office suite in the Pentagon.”

Rita Hayworth and Orson WellesGetty Images

Renamed “Orson Welles Today” by May, the column became more and more sporadic as its author became distracted by health issues, his failing marriage to Hollywood siren Rita Hayworth and severe financial problems that forced him to seek radio work.

After Welles ignored a letter from Thackrey asking him to keep in mind he was not writing for “a small, specialized audience of intellectuals,” The Post’s syndication editor unsuccessfully pleaded with Welles to write more about entertainment or take a pay cut. (According to his biographer Barbara Leaming, Welles was paid $350 a week — about $4,600 in 2015 dollars — plus 50 percent of revenues from syndication to other newspapers, many of which quickly dropped the column.)

While Welles would occasionally write about a subject like “The Actor’s Role in Society” — “We need a repertory theatre. We need a lot of them quick before we forget how to do our job” — toward the end he was mostly busy handing out advice to President Harry Truman and musing about the atomic age.

Welles finally quit, and his final column on Nov. 4, 1945, begins with his humorous account of finally obtaining a driver’s license at age 30 and getting lost with his new car — on the studio back lot where he had happily resumed his movie-directing career with “The Stranger.”